Greg Freiherr has reported on developments in radiology since 1983. He runs the consulting service, The Freiherr Group.

Blog | August 26, 2011

Thinking Inside the Box

Hard to believe 18 years have passed since I dropped into the engineering lab of Diasonics Ultrasound, a visit brought to mind today by the unveiling half way around the world of another advance in diagnostic ultrasound. That visit and today’s announcement in Vienna, Austria, at the World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology demonstrate what ultrasound has become and, for the foreseeable future, will continue to be.

In that Milpitas, Calif., lab in 1993, I saw strewn across a workbench the prototype of the ultrasound industry’s first vascular road-mapping product.  Until then, vascular sonography had processed just the frequency of sound waves. This technology, dubbed UltrasoundAngio,  processed the amplitude of sound waves to create static images of blood perfusion.

The team at Diasonics had done what others in the industry would soon hustle to replicate. They had found a way to process otherwise unused data to create images unlike any ever made with ultrasound.  Over the next two decades, this would become a familiar reprise.

Later development of tissue harmonics would increase signal-to-noise so much that the details of pathologies previously unseen would become crystal clear. Those images came from processing higher frequencies – the harmonics – produced when ultrasound pulses go through body tissue…signals that previously had not been captured.

Shearwave elastography with its palpating virtual finger of sound added a new wrinkle to the face of ultrasound, compressing tissues for an instant so that conventional ultrasonic imaging could gauge tissue elasticity. Because malignant tissues are stiffer than healthy ones, shearwave elastography raises the prospect of helping to assess the breast, prostate, liver and other organs for cancer. This potential, and the possibility that elasticity may indicate other disease states as well, are still being studied, as ultrasound technology continues to advance, repeating this pattern of thinking not outside the box, but in.

Supersonic Imagine, the French pioneer of shearwave elastography, today unveiled technology that combines color flow imaging and pulsed wave Doppler, producing what the company says are color flow clips with 10 times the frame rate of conventional color Doppler. This new product, dubbed UltraFast Doppler, also quantifies the Doppler data.

Peter Burns, a professor of medical biophysics at the University of Toronto, says the advance is clinically significant in two ways. First, it has the speed to reveal pathology in arterial imaging that would otherwise be obscured by aliasing artifacts. Second, it speeds workflow by combining the pulsed Dopper and color flow acquisitions.

So it is that this latest wrinkle adds to the character of diagnostic ultrasound, which has progressed beyond the easy pickings of its youth. With maturity has come iterative development and improvement that find value in what has been overlooked and what has yet to be combined.


Related Content

News | Radiology Business

July 19, 2024 — GE HealthCare announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Intelligent Ultrasound Group PLC’s ...

Time July 19, 2024
arrow
Feature | Women's Health | By Jordan Bazinsky

Investing in women’s health should not merely be a metric on the equity dashboard — it should drive policy and tactical ...

Time July 08, 2024
arrow
News | Ultrasound Women's Health

June 18, 2024 — The International Society of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology (ISUOG) has announced details of ...

Time June 18, 2024
arrow
News | Radiology Business

May 29, 2024 — Strategic Radiology added a third California member to the nation’s leading coalition of independent ...

Time May 29, 2024
arrow
News | Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS)

May 20, 2024 — Exo (pronounced “echo”), a medical imaging software and devices company, announced the release of Exo ...

Time May 20, 2024
arrow
News | Radiology Imaging

May 13, 2024 — National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), and the Next ...

Time May 13, 2024
arrow
News | Contrast Media

April 24, 2024 — The International Contrast Ultrasound Society (ICUS) and Northwest Imaging Forums (NWIF) announced an ...

Time April 24, 2024
arrow
News | Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)

April 8, 2024 — Magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) is a non-invasive technique for neuroregulation ...

Time April 08, 2024
arrow
News | Radiology Business

April 4, 2024 — FUJIFILM Healthcare Americas Corporation, a leading provider of diagnostic and enterprise imaging ...

Time April 04, 2024
arrow
News | Radiation Oncology

April 2, 2024 — In a 10-center study, microwave ablation offered progression free survival rates and fewer complications ...

Time April 02, 2024
arrow
Subscribe Now